Community

Open10MS: Still Open … Still Free

Posted on by tarus

I’m sitting in my office, which once housed all three of the OpenNMS Group founders, drinking some Copperline Amber while listening to the “tap tap tap” of the drums as the guys in the next room play Rock Band on our HD projector.

The reason? Ten years ago the OpenNMS Project was registered as project 4141 on Sourceforge (become a fan on Facebook).

Not many open source projects can claim 10 years, and I am both delighted and humbled that our community has not only allowed OpenNMS to survive but to thrive.

To celebrate, we threw a little party. Here’s a picture:

Back row:

Jay Aras (MA, USA), Donald Desloge (NC, USA), Brad Miesner (NC, USA), Mike Davidson (NC, USA), Me (NC, USA), Brian Weaver (NC, USA), David Hustace (NC, USA), Matt Brozowski (NC, USA), Jeff Gehlbach (GA, USA)

Laptops:

Alex Finger (France), Craig Miskell (New Zealand), Bill Ayres (OR, USA)

iMacs: Matt Raykowski and Mike Huot (MN, USA), Johan Edstrom (CO, USA), Antonio Russo (Italy), Alejandro Galue (Venezuela), Klaus Thielking-Riechert (Germany), DJ Gregor (OH, USA)

Front Row:

Seth Leger (NC, USA), Ben Reed (NC, USA) and Larry Karnowski (NC, USA)

It is truly a nationwide and worldwide effort (it was hard to pick a time for the picture, as it was Tuesday evening for the Europeans and Wednesday morning for Craig).

As I have often mentioned, I didn’t start OpenNMS, so it was nice to have Brian Weaver, the original architect of the product, come out for the day. He told me that the project started on 1 July 1999, so it is actually several months older, but as we have a firm date on Sourceforge I figured we’d stick with that.

Also in attendance were Mike Davidson and Larry Karnowski, two of the original developers, as well as Ben Reed and Seth Leger (but the latter two work for the company now).

Here’s a picture of the gang from May of 2002, when OpenNMS version 1.0 was released. See if you can pick out the people who are still around.

In addition to beer and pizza, David’s wife made an amazing cake:

and DJ Gregor sent us, overnight, some Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream.

Yum. Here’s to the next 10.

New Order of the Green Polo Members

Posted on by tarus

OpenNMS has survived and grown mainly through the support of its community. The core of that community is represented by an organization called “The Order of the Green Polo” (OGP) and it is the governing body of the OpenNMS project.

Membership must be earned, and current members are responsible for voting in new members. In fact, there are a number of OpenNMS Group employees who are not members of the OGP – while I tend to hire out of that group it is not something I always do, and membership must be earned regardless of where you work.

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce today two new members of the OGP. They both hail from Germany, and they, along with Alex Finger (already a member) are responsible for the upcoming OpenNMS book.

I am constantly humbled by what our community is able to accomplish. We had been talking about an OpenNMS book for years, but it took three guys in Germany to actually make it a reality (well, at least real enough to pre-order).

Klaus Thielking-Riechert has been involved with OpenNMS since the spring of 2008 and is a regular contributor to the discussion lists. He and his wife are also fine hosts and have great taste in beer.

Ronny Trommer works for our partner in Germany, Nethinks, and while also involved in the book he has done a lot of work on the code as well. He gave us the idea for integrating with JasperReports. Here is a “morning” outage report he created (click for a larger image):

We have now formally integrated it into OpenNMS and it will be included in the next release, along with a large number of “canned” reports.

In an environment where the role of community in open source is being questioned, I am both excited and humbled to see ours doing so well. Come meet us at the OpenNMS Users Conference (early-bird registration ending soon).

We're Number Two!

Posted on by tarus

Just wanted to post a quick note that in the recent Linux Questions poll on the best network monitoring application, OpenNMS came in second.

The winner, Nagios, pretty much destroyed the field, but OpenNMS got more than twice as many votes as the third most popular choice. This wasn’t unexpected, since Nagios is much more of a general purpose monitoring solution, especially within the target audience of Linux Questions. OpenNMS is built for scale, and thus appeals to a smaller set of users.

But still, it was nice that people took the time out to vote. When you work on an open source project, especially a large scale open source project, you tend to be so heads down making improvements that you forget how useful it can be “as is”.

It’s always nice to know that the work you do is appreciated, so thanks to all who voted.

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Posted on by tarus

A friend of mine makes music, and her first CD was published by a company I had never heard of called CD Baby. I fell in love with their wonderful ideas concerning customer service. Here is an example taken from an e-mail after I bought the CD:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 19th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

CD Baby was founded by Derek Sivers, who has some really interesting ideas on community, running a business and social contracts. On his blog today he posted a link to a Youtube video called “Leadership Lessions from Dancing Guy”. It was from a talk he gave yesterday at TED.

If you’ve learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let’s watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons.

It’s pretty cool and worth a few minutes to check out.

OpenNMS Users Conference Registration Now Open

Posted on by tarus

Last year, with the help of Nethinks in Germany, we held the first OpenNMS Users Conference. It was a lot of fun and so we’re doing it again this year, and registration is now open.

It will be held 6-7 May at the Le Meridien Parkhotel in Frankfurt.

Building on the success of the last conference, we’ve extended it to span two days instead of one. The first day will consist of presentations, while the second will be made up of workshops.

I am especially excited that most of the presentations are being given by end users of OpenNMS and not people either associated with the OpenNMS Group or the Order of the Green Polo. The workshops, however, feature a long list of well known contributors and should provide for a high level of technical training.

The cost for both days is 499€, but if you register by 10 March you can save 60€.

Space is limited so register early, and I look forward to seeing you there.

Open Source, Social Contracts and Running a Business

Posted on by tarus

When I started my first company in 2002, I had a lot of previous employers to provide examples, both positive and negative, of how to run a business. At the time IBM and Hewlett-Packard were leaders in network management, so I could have modeled my business on them.

Instead I modeled it on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Many might think it was a strange choice, but it seems to have worked out well, at least for us.

First, they make a good product. This is of paramount importance in any business.

Second, they limited the amount of money the highest paid people could earn in salary. In their case, the highest paid person could not make more than seven times the lowest paid person.

I am constantly disgusted by executive salaries these days. Being a previous employee of NORTEL, now in bankruptcy, I find it highly ironic that the executives responsible for driving the company into the ground received huge retention bonus to keep them from leaving. In a just world they would have had no where to go, and particularly they would not be financially rewarded for poor performance.

To me a salary should exist to cover the basic necessities of living, but the real compensation should be based on the performance of the company. Let me stress that I want there to be no limits on overall compensation – if the company is doing well I want everyone’s “upside” to be unlimited. But getting a huge salary just for showing up feels wrong, especially if the company is doing poorly.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs ever, takes home a salary of just $1.

Back to Ben and Jerry’s. The one other thing they did that I admired was to donate a certain percentage of pre-tax profits to charity.

I like donating to charity, but I find that I am most eager to give to those organizations that are a) small and b) concerned directly with something I care about. Thus each year I give to the EFF, the FSF and the SFLC, plus a number of local charities.

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, we were shocked and saddened like most of the world. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. Luckily, the opportunity came in a most unexpected way.

Matt and Jeff (along with Alex) were hanging out in the OpenNMS IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net) when a man named Andris Bjornson joined and started asking questions about OpenNMS. It turns out that he works for an organization called Inveneo that supplies bandwidth in rural and under-served areas in the developing world. Haiti was the perfect example of a place that needed their services, since a lot of the relief effort is run by non-government organizations (NGOs), and they rely on communications in order to maximize the good they can do.

Haiti’s communications infrastructure, such as it was, was destroyed by the earthquake, and Inveneo is using wireless technology to provide a timely replacement. Of course they need some way to manage this infrastructure (as you can imagine, it is in high demand) and they chose OpenNMS.




Andris installing an antenna in Port au Prince (click for more pictures)

Andris has been using OpenNMS for awhile, but he had some questions and there were some issues in managing the radios they were using. The guys in the channel were more than happy to help out, but we wanted to be involved in a more formal way.

We decided to donate a commercial support contract to Inveneo to help them out in Haiti.

It’s pretty cool to be involved, at least in some small way, with getting Haiti back on its feet. It was also cool to have OpenNMS chosen from all possible apps out there to play a role.

You can read more about Inveneo and OpenNMS in this press release, and please consider donating to their efforts.

Open source has a large social component, and I have a theory that being involved in open source software makes one generally more interested in social issues. I want to hear from others about their experiences with social causes tied to open source. Jon “Maddog” Hall is also a fan of Inveneo, and I’d love to have more examples.

UPDATE: Here’s a network diagram of the Inveneo network, and the “How to Deploy” document mentions us by name.

Netflix and Warner Bros.

Posted on by tarus

I’ve blogged in the past about my issues with Netflix, and I definitely have a love/hate relationship with them, but at the moment I am pretty happy as a Netflix customer. While I’m still not very satisfied with their customer service, they are making the right moves in other areas.

One is that streaming is now available on the PS3. I have heard that, in order not to break an agreement with Microsoft and the Xbox, there could not be a downloadable app, but they sent me a disk which allows me to stream from the PS3 to my television, which is only slightly annoying (I have to insert the disk versus just turning on the machine).

So I read with amusement that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment negotiated a 28 day delay before new releases would be available on the Netflix service, in exchange for more favorable terms and more content to be available via streaming.

I think this is a great deal for Netflix and a pretty stupid move on the part of Warner Bros. Their reasoning is that the availability of renting a DVD the day it is released cuts in to DVD sales. I’d love to see the numbers after this change, but my guess is that they will stay pretty flat.

My reasoning in simple. If someone loves a movie enough to buy it, that buying decision is made without regard to if it can be rented. Either they get it close to the day it is released since they like it so much, or they get it as a gift at some later point in time. In my own informal poll, people tend to buy movies they’ve already seen, and thus those that are sold in the first few weeks of release are sold to people who have already seen the movie in the theatre. This is unaffected by the availability of the title on Netflix.

I just don’t see someone going “Jeez, I can either wait four weeks to see ‘Final Destination 3D‘ for free as part of my Netflix subscription or drop $15+ to buy it from Amazon – ooh, hit that one-click” especially when a monthly Netflix subscription costs about the same if not less.

But this is a great deal for Netflix, especially if they get better access to the Warner Bros. back catalog for streaming. I don’t think anyone will argue that in ten years (if not sooner) almost all video will be delivered via streaming, and so seeing Netflix positioning itself as the best streaming service is a smart move.

I think there are parallels here with open source. You have a legacy company like Warner Bros. trying to understand a new distribution model in much the same way you have commercial software companies trying to come to grips with open source. Netflix, on the other hand, is similar to OpenNMS as a company that “gets it” and is laying the groundwork to become a dominant player.

The biggest thing we struggle with is trying to break people out of the mold that good software must be purchased. People have the expectation that software comes in shrink-wrapped boxes with a DVD and a license key, and anything else is just wrong. In much the same way, Warner Bros. thinks that having early access to the physical media is important to a consumer’s buying decision.

Now the streaming service provided by Netflix does not compare with, say, the quality of a Blu-ray disk, but are you willing to bet against it getting close in the near future? In much the same way, OpenNMS is not a complete replacement for suites like OpenView or Tivoli today, but with large improvements year over year it will be. My guess is that companies that understand open source today will be the dominant players in the software markets of tomorrow.

Thoughts on the New Year

Posted on by tarus

Okay, I have a lot of stuff I’d like to post but the problem will be finding the time, so instead of meticulously crafting a post in my usual manner (grin) this one will be more “stream of consciousness”.

Last year started off horribly for the business side of things. It was so bad that I had to cancel our annual developer’s conference, Dev-Jam. It is a huge regret, since come March things went crazy and we posted three record quarters in a row, but it was the decision to make at the time.

When we had our first Dev-Jam it was kind of a lark, but I didn’t realize how important that yearly gathering of people was to the project. We’ve inked in the week of July 25th, 2010, back at the University of Minnesota, to make sure we don’t miss out again.

Other than that, 2009 was a great year. We hired Jason Aras (an OGP member) as a full time employee and Seth Leger, one of the original OpenNMS coders, came to work for us on a contract basis (and we hope he’ll join us full time in 2010).

On the development side we got a lot of interesting custom development business and delved more fully into the whole “agile” development process. It has enabled us to work more efficiently (especially as distributed as we are) and produce even more robust code. The last week in December we switched to git to streamline further our development process.

We enter 2010 in the best shape of our corporate lives, and I am confident it will be a solid year for the OpenNMS project as well. Seeing all of this talk about Sun/Oracle/MySQL and copyright assignment makes me glad that we are bootstrapped and make money the old fashioned way (by spending less than we earn) versus having to make concessions to our open source philosophy.

On the down side, it is frustrating not to be able to implement some of our ideas as quickly as I would like, but our organic growth means that the pace of development is getting faster and faster. This results in higher revenues, and since we plow all that back into the company it just feeds the growth of the project.

All the experts say that this business model is flawed and that we’re not a “real” company or at a minimum we are some sort of “lifestyle company“, but you know what? I don’t care. And as long as we can stick to our mission statement of “Help customers, have fun, make money” I don’t have to. (grin)

But if I had to lay out a goal for 2010 it would be to make it easier for people to get involved, and to get those involved more involved. I think calling 2010 “The Year of Community” is a little cheesy, but that is where my heart lies. We have a new stable release coming out, our first book (in German) and an iPhone app all in the first half of the year, but I think that would pale in my mind to getting the community back on track, and I hope that Dev-Jam goes a long way toward getting that done.

Happy New Year everyone.

The Kindness of Strangers

Posted on by tarus

So far the OSMC has been very enjoyable. The talks have been good and the networking outside the talks has been even better.

Dr. Michael Schwartzkopff did a presentation on SNMP, and his slides could have been lifted from some of my own. He, like me, is a fan of Net-SNMP, and I learned about a log monitoring feature that is pretty cool. He also took time to help me figure out how to get Net-SNMP to properly generate traps based on values that Net-SNMP can monitor natively (blog post coming soon). His company has a three digit Private Enterprise ID (813) whereas mine is in the low four digits (2432).

I also got to meet Kristian Köhntopp, who is anything but a fan of SNMP. He gave an interesting talk on monitoring MySQL, but he has also known our own Alexander Finger for many years. It was fun to watch a debate between Michael and Kristian on the merits of SNMP, although there was no clear winner (I had my favorite, however).

My own talk went okay. I got laughs where I wanted to get laughs, and I didn’t see anyone sleeping. Also, no one left the room, which I think is a first (grin). The only problem I had (outside of speaking at a Nagios conference) was with the funky headset they asked me to wear (it kept slipping off my big head).

After the talk I got to meet Jens Bothe from OTRS. Especially in Europe, OTRS is a very popular ticketing system. Jonathan Sartin has created a bi-directional interface between OpenNMS and OTRS that was committed back to the OTRS project. It is available as a package so it is easy to install.

The biggest surprise was meeting Rihards Olups. He is part of the Zabbix project, and over the last year or so I’ve been hearing more and more about Zabbix so I’m very interested in hearing his talk. One thing I like about them is that they seem very similar to us: a small group of dedicated people working to create both open source software and an open source business.

Unfortunately, also like us, they seem to be the victim of code theft, or at least some very questionable licensing practices. A company called Firescope appears to have appropriated some of the Zabbix code. They have raised several million dollars in VC funding, lead by a company called Technology Advisors, and it seems they have used this money to put a prettier front end to the Zabbix code (sound familiar?). Apparently efforts by Zabbix to get this issue resolved have been a failure.

Note: Please read the comments below. The CEO of Firescope has responded to these claims with more information. I am hoping that Alexei will respond when he can. When I get some time I plan to download the trial version of Firescope as well as Zabbix and see for myself if the similarities still exist, but until then I will withhold judgement and I ask that you do as well.

This really pisses me off, of course. I think part of the issue is that Zabbix is headquartered in Latvia, and my guess is those people at Firescope felt that they would not be in a position to challenge or question the Firescope use of their code. And the unfortunate part is that they are right. It’s a sad fact that very few people outside of a small open source community cares. We found out with our own copyright issues that there is little recourse when someone appropriates your code that doesn’t involved spending a lot of money with lawyers. Some people will point you to the Software Freedom Law Center (an organization I support with an annual donation, by the way) but the charter of the SFLC prevents them from helping projects with a commercial interest, even, as is the case with Zabbix and OpenNMS, if that interest is not a large, well-funded corporation.

We were lucky in that we have become profitable enough to afford proper legal council, and so we could hire Eben Moglen and his team at Moglen Ravischer. When I heard about the issues Zabbix are having with Firescope, I made an introduction between Alexei Vladishev and Eben’s team in the hope that they could work out an arrangement like we were able to do.

Some might find this unusual, since on the surface it might seem that OpenNMS and Zabbix are competitors. In fact, we have run into them at one or two accounts, so the smart thing to do would be to ignore their problems. It may be the smart thing, but it wouldn’t be the right thing. We learned a lot going through this process ourselves so it would be wrong not to help another company, especially one so similar to our own.

Anyway, I hadn’t really thought about this again until I met Rihards. He introduced himself and apologized that Alexei could not have come in person (apparently he is off doing great things with clients in Japan). And in a very surprise move he presented me with a ceramic magnet from Riga and a loaf of amazingly dense and sweet smelling rye bread.

I was touched, and we struck up a friendship. I’ve been told the best way to eat the bread is with cured meats (and me having just left Italy [sigh]) and good butter. I also have a standing invitation to visit and eat wild mushrooms (not the “magic” kind, however).

Rihards joined Ronny Trommer and myself at an event last night that involved a lot of beer, good food, and a surprising amount of American pop music from the 1990s. It was a fun night, and I look forward to the resolution of the issues between Zabbix and Firescope, as well as eating those mushrooms.

Tonight Ronny and I head off to meet Klaus Thielking-Riechert. He is putting us up for the night. Klaus, along with Ronny and Alex, are writing an OpenNMS book. And unlike the book I am writing, this one actually exists and I look forward to seeing it in print.

When you think about it, all great friendships start with a meeting of strangers.